But I wonder if this to the authors point. You used to love fiddling with settings (I do as well) but modern software continuously makes that less rewarding.

I don’t think rewarding is the right word. It’s still very rewarding but modern software decides from time to time to undo all your work. Maybe we could say that modern software disrespects their users.

It becomes less rewarding because of the effort wasted. Making the same settings changes over and over is not enjoyable. But saying that modern software disrespects user settings is a very good way to put it as well.

It should be easier than ever to maintain settings; the tooling is so much better now.

Right, I think a lot of people enjoyed customising their first computer, and then when they got a new one or reinstalled Windows because it got slow they couldn't be bothered to do it again.

But maybe things are a bit different nowadays. Web-based software might not have this problem so much, and I think mainstream mobile OSes do a good job of importing your setup when you get a new phone.

This happened to me early on in programming career. Coming out university I had a highly customized emacs environment, that I regularly tweaked. But then on my first job, while I could use emacs on my workstation, our production systems were all Solaris were I could only use vi (not VIM, vi). The cognitive load between them killed me and I retrained myself on vi. Today I use vim, but really only change a few things like the theme.